The Ash Atlas began with photographs that were difficult for me to keep apart. Images of explosions from the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, photographs from the uprising and massacre of protesters in December 2025 and January 2026, and photographs from my own ordinary life. They belong to different moments and different kinds of experience, but increasingly I found myself seeing them together. I print, cut, and suspend the photographs in the studio, making temporary arrangements that I photograph again. One image covers another, casts a shadow on it, or survives only as a fragment. Nothing quite settles into place.
I am not trying to make these images explain one another. What interests me is the difficulty of their proximity: the strange way catastrophe can arrive through photographs while daily life continues around it, and the way an image can be evidence, memory, object, and something already drifting from its original meaning. The Ash Atlas is a map made from what remains, incomplete and continually rearranging itself.
Fari Mazzotta 